Archives for June 2009

There are few things more heart breaking than working with clients who want to grow their families, but are having a hard time doing it. Even with infertility medicine there are still many couples that have trouble conceiving. In this article UK based Sejual Shah talks about some on the non-medical reasons that can make conceiving difficult as well as advice on how to approach some of these with tapping (EvEFT/EFT).

[Sejual Shah is a Hertfordshire, UK base practitioner. She works in person, by phone, and webcam with clients on over 4 continents. She loves seeing the joy her work brings to her clients. She can be contacted @ healthyinmind.com]

Wanting to conceive a baby is a natural part of our growth and development as humans. However, many find starting their families difficult. Using controlled practices such as timing intercourse to ovulation can lead to a lot of stress for both parents and conceiving even the first baby becomes a nightmare instead of the anticipated joy.

Pregnancies attempted late in life are perceived in the medical field as difficult since a woman’s fertility declines heavily after her mid-30s. What many Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) practitioners, myself included, are finding is that these and other problems can be neutralised with tapping to enable a healthy conception leading all the way to realising that cherished birth of innocent joy.

The support I give is of help to both people in the relationship. Men’s stress levels and worries about conceiving are equally important as the problems a woman experiences as both parents need to be healthy to create a baby.

Common Problems with Fertility
The most common problems I encounter in my practice and have success in helping with EFT are:

Unresolved Grief
Conceiving a child is an act of joy. When we are harbouring a deep-seated grief it is too far removed for the joy and happiness to come in. It is like the two sets of emotions are incompatible and as the grief has been there longer it stops the new possibilities from coming in.

This grief comes in so many shapes and forms. “Heather” was 44 and was still waiting to conceive her first child. She felt the pressure of not being able to, conceive. She had tried natural approaches and IVF, but nothing was working. When we talked about her personal history it quickly became evident that she’d never finished grieving over the loss of her beloved mother ten years before. She still had her mother’s ashes in a cupboard in the bedroom.

Very gently we tapped away the grief. We created emotional space so Heather could express all the things she never got to tell her mum before she passed away. Over several sessions Heather went through a gentle clearing process to lastingly let go of the grief. With this approach she was able to create mental space within herself to bring in new life. Four months ago she gave birth to a healthy set of twins that have brought countless joy and new opportunities for growth in her life.

Lasting grief often accompanies pregnancies lost before the baby reaches full term. One client shared, “I miscarried at ten weeks. The doctors just said it happens to everyone and that I should get over it”. Yet, in those ten precious weeks that same woman was already connecting from the heart with this longed-for baby. While it may have been as tiny as a beetle, that baby was still real and alive for her. If we can’t grieve properly over what could have been, then it’s difficult for us to make way for what we wish to realise.

It’s equally important to clear that grief over stillbirths, or other upsetting losses like losing a sibling when they were young.

High stress levels
Stress can be a huge barrier to conceiving. Stress can come from high-pressured jobs, draining situations in our lives, and feeling that we must be perfect at everything we do.

Some of the women who come to me for help have very full active lives. They feel empowered by their successes – and they have every right to – but nobody has yet taught them how they can release the accompanying stress that constantly builds up. Keeping up their work successes turns sour – they’ve fought for their career progression but now it is cruelly taking away a cherished goal.

In this situation, I help them address their work stress so that instead of constantly fire-fighting, their bodies can relax and get on with conceiving.

“Diane” came from a background where her parents were proud of her high-flying achievements. She had gone further than her brothers and sisters in her studies and was a well-paid executive. That hard work attitude had helped her create huge success, but hard work didn’t pay off when it came to conceiving. She and her husband had been trying for years and wondered if the time had come to give up. But it wasn’t in her nature to quit – hadn’t she fought for each promotion?

Initially she came to see me for help in moving up the next rung of the ladder up to the boardroom. She saw the glass ceiling and was determined to crack it.

Diane and I worked to help her relax in these work situations and so have more energy to put into her work. She learned to thrive without high levels of stress in her demanding role by using EFT in sessions with me, and then learning how to do basic structured tapping exercises outside of our work. Her body realised she didn’t need to feel stressed all the time.

In that process of releasing the stress she conceived naturally and used our work to help her manage her still hectic schedule with the demands the growing baby was making on her physically, so that she could still nurture the foetus. Her baby son was born bouncingly healthy one year ago. With the work we had already done she was able to devise a healthy strategy for balancing her return to her career while enjoying motherhood in a balanced way.

EFT as a stress management tool can also support a man experiencing problems with sperm health as a result of a pressurized life-style.

Conclusion
There is a very complicated connection between our physical and emotional health. Many times the emotions we are carrying prevent the body from fulfilling its potential. By doing work on these core emotional issues we can see transformation in our physical health.

[Note From Gene: Recently I had the opportunity to interview Dene Ballantine about the grief some people feel after being part of an abortion decision. You can hear that interview in Pod #10]

One of the most common questions I get about tapping (EvEFT/EFT) is “What do I do when I don’t know what memories from the past are effecting my behavior or emotions today?” In this interview I talk to Rod Sherwin about a very cool protocol call Solution Focused Brief Therapy. In this protocol you don’t have to worry about why you are the way you are, but instead it focuses on how to move to what you want. Personally, I find this to be a great approach because even when I don’t know why things are the way they are I am going to know where I want to be or who I want to be. In this interview Rod lays out the basic steps of SFBT that can easily be added to any tapping routine.

About Rod: Rod Sherwin, known as “the tapping man”, is an Energy Therapist from Melbourne, Australia. Rod runs the Tap4Health EFT Practice and works with clients all over the world on issues such as stress, anxiety, trauma, abuse, anger management, depression, weight loss, public speaking and presenting. Rod’s approach is an unconventional and original combination of genuine warmth, respect, intuition, and skill.

Rod’s primary tool is the Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) which he combines with his experience in Energy Medicine, Solutions-Focus Brief Therapy, 6-Human Needs Psychology, and Neuro-Associative Conditioning. Rod’s original qualifications are in Computer System Engineering and Computer Science which gives him a very grounded and practical aproach that focuses on getting real results.

Rod loves spreading the word about EFT and speaks to groups, small and large, including community groups, social groups, and corporates.Rod has lived in Melbourne for since 2005 and, while he enjoys the city life, he is originally from a small country town in North Queensland called Charters Towers.

Some people aren’t comfortable with the idea of gambling, but my experience working with a professional poker player demonstrated how our emotions can override our logic, how this can be disastrous, and how easy it is to use tapping (EvEFT/EFT) to make changes.

There are types of gambling that are pure chance such as the lottery or slot machines. These games require no skill. The only choice the player makes is whether or not to play. With each play there is a statistical chance of winning and losing.

Poker is different from games of chance. There is a component of chance involved in the cards that you are dealt, but poker players make a number of choices on how to play their cards. A good poker player considers the playing patterns of his opponents as well as how the other players at the table think he plays. All of this is in addition to the cards he has been dealt. Because of this, it is much less about the cards that have been dealt and much more about how the cards are played. For this reason poker is not a game of chance, but a game of skill with chance elements.

Because there is an element of chance in poker, a player can run good or bad in a short period of time, (a small sample set of hands) based on the cards he/she is dealt, but over the long run a player’s skill is going to show. The more hands that are played, the more likely it is that the better player is going to be a winner overall.

Professional poker players understand this. They don’t think in terms of winning one hand, or of being a winner over one session of hands, they think in terms of their average over time. Very good players will know this right down to an average hourly wage. For example, a particular player might know that if she/he is playing in a game that has a minimum bet of $2, they will make forty dollars an hour – in the long run – because of his/her skill level.

A comparable example would be investing in the stock market. Stocks and markets move up and down each day, but over a long period of time they have trends. A good investor knows the longer he is in a certain investment, the more likely his long-term return is going to match the trend.

The way a poker player is able to combat this variance (up and down swings), is by playing as many hands as possible. The more hands they play, the more they are going to insulate themselves from up and down swings. With the advent of internet poker, players are able to play many games at the exact same time by opening multiple computer windows. To combat this variance some players are known to play as many as one hundred hands an hour… in six games at once… for stretches of ten or twelve hours straight. That’s as many as six thousand hands in one stretch!

You can imagine the amount of concentration it takes to do this. Not only is a player constantly recalculating the different statistical outcomes of a hand based on each new card, they are also having to keep track of the play tendencies of the eight other players involved in each hand.

As play unfolds it is possible for players to get very emotional. It is possible to lose a hand that you had a 90% chance of winning, causing great anger. It is also possible to win a hand you were a significant underdog in, causing great joy. Both of these circumstances can be very dangerous. When a player becomes too emotional (regardless of which emotions) he/she can start making poor decisions. In poker terms this is called going on ‘tilt’.

When a player is on tilt they are not paying attention to all of the factors they normally pay attention to. They begin to play very poorly, and they can lose all of the money they had won over a number of hours (or days) of play, in one or two hands.

Recently a professional poker player, “John”, who was having a major problem with his game, approached me. John plays six to eight hours a day, five days a week, and poker is his full time income. John understands how long he can stay focused. He never plays more than eight hours at a time because he knows that as his mind becomes fatigued it is harder for him to make the good choices that make him a winning player.

John’s problem: he was finding it very hard to get up from the computer after a losing session (meaning that on this day he had lost money overall). He understands the variance of his winning and losing. He knows that over the long term he is a winning player, but he had a mental block about getting up near the end of the losing session.

It’s easy to see how this problem would multiply itself. He would have a losing session, causing him to keep playing past his mental peak. Since he was past his mental peak, he’d play worse, causing him to lose more. This would push him on tilt. By being on tilt he would play worse, causing him to lose more. This cycle would repeat until he walked away in frustration after losing far too much money.

I had John tune into the feeling of not wanting to get up at the end of his most recent losing session. As we investigated the feeling, he described how he knew because of his skill and experience that he was better than everyone he was playing with. He knew intellectually about the swings of the game, but emotionally he couldn’t let these players get the best of him. We began by tapping on the facts of the situation with phrases like this (I don’t remember the exact phrases):

“I know I am a better player than most of the people I play with…I understand that poker does have chance elements in it…there are going to be times when players who are worse than me are going to get the better of me…because of the variance of the game…over the long term I am a winning player…there are ups and downs in the game…I never play in a game that I can’t afford…I am playing with players I can beat…it is okay to have one losing session because I know over the long haul I will come out ahead…I know I need to get up after 8 hours of play…because I lose my mental edge…and play worse…I give myself permission to know that I can get up after a losing session knowing I will come out ahead in the long run”

After doing the tapping I had John tune back into the feeling of needing to stay at the end of the losing session. He said most of the desire to keep playing was gone, but there was still something hanging around. I asked him what the feeling reminded him of. He then said the classic line, “I don’t know if this has anything to do with this, but…” and then proceeded to tell of a time when he was playing youth hockey and was screamed at by a coach after a loss. He talked about how much he hated losing.

We quickly used tapping to do some clean up on the emotions of that memory. I then had him once again tune back into the feeling at the end of the most recent losing session. He reported there was no desire to stay at the computer playing.

Six weeks later John reported that he had had some losing sessions during that time, but he had never once stayed past his mental prime of six to eight hours. This resulted in an increase of his profitability, more than he expected. He hadn’t realized just how much this problem had been affecting his game.

This week’s podcast deals with two of the most common questions I receive from clients and readers. First, we look at how negative emotions like anger, frustration, jealousy, and sadness can serve us. Second, we cover how to come up with tapping phrases and if we need to say them out loud when doing borrowing benefits work.

Bio: Gene Monterastelli is a Baltimore based EFT practitioner. He regularly works with clients in the areas of stress, weight loss, limiting beliefs, anxieties, learning disabilities, pain management, and relationship issues. He is the editor of EFT Q & A. There is a very special place in his practice that is dedicated to parents of special needs children, especially for parents of children who have diagnosed with Autistic Spectral Disorder (ASD). Gene works with clients from all over the world one-on-one and in groups.

About John: John has been a student of what makes people do what they do since he was a teenager. At times, failure was his best teacher, driving him to continue to seek knowledge and understanding. His journey had led him to studies in a wide range of philosophies ideas, from ancient to modern.
Using what he uncovered, John has been successful in sales, and most recently, in the education field.

He has a Bachelor Degree in Psychology, and a Master Degree in Education. He is a Certified ZPoint coach/practitioner, an advanced practitioner of EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques), as well as a Reiki Master (Usui and Kundalini methods) , and a member of The Association for Comprehensive Energy Psychology, and the Association for the Advancement of Meridian Energy Techniques.

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Gene Monterastelli is a Brooklyn based EFT practitioner who in addition to work with clients and groups regularly writes and records about how to use the tapping to move from self-sabotage to productive action.Gene's Full Bio & Services